February 23, 2010

‘HuffPost College’ Compiles National Campus News

The Huffington Post, a popular blog and news aggregation website, added a new college section Monday, which will include articles from college newspapers and contributors across the county. In a post discussing the new section’s launch, Arianna Huffington, the website’s founder, said she wanted the section to offer “a real-time snapshot of what’s going on in the lives of the nation’s 19 million college students.”

The section, called HuffPost College, includes contributions from 60 college newspapers, including The Sun. The newspapers and individual contributors receive no compensation for content posted on the website. The section displays links to articles on newspapers’ websites and includes full articles from contributors.

The launch of HuffPost College follows the indefinite suspension in October of UWIRE, a widely-used news aggregation service for college newspapers. The service allowed its 850 college media outlet members to share content and cater to wider audiences. Student editors suspected the service’s suspension was a result of financial problems, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In her post, Huffington did not discuss the finances of her new section.

She said that spending time with her daughters and on college campuses giving talks reminded her “of all the excitement, promise, passion, intellectual curiosity, and vitality of college life … That’s why I’m delighted that we have created HuffPost College.”

The section lists several other Ivy League student newspapers as contributors, including the Harvard Crimson, Daily Princetonian and Yale Daily News.

“We are always looking for ways to expand, especially online,” said Ben Cotton, Columbia ’11, editor-in-chief of the Columbia Spectator, which also contributes to the section. “It seemed like a really cool endeavor.”

The editor of HuffPost College, Jose Antonio Vargas, could not be reached by press time yesterday.

On Monday, the section’s first day of operation, content included a post by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about college debt and a post by the president of Spelman College about the importance of historically black colleges. The section also included a post by Jeff Katz ’10, a sex columnist at The Sun, about finding late-night hookups via text message.

“My years at university were among the most stimulating — and challenging — of my life,” Huffington said in the post discussing the section’s launch. “That once-in-a-lifetime blend of stimulation and challenge, risk and reward, promise and uncertainly … is what animates HuffPost College.”

Related

Last night, members of the Cornell Organization for Labor Action and their allies lobbied the City of Ithaca to join the State and Local Government Sweatfree Consortium and buy uniforms for its officials through non-sweatshop factories. Elected officials appeared to greet COLA’s anti-sweatshop proposal enthusiastically, though they did not commit to any action.